When you look at that list, it’s not easy to see how they relate. Which is because they have different origins that happened to end up at the same word; lap.

Your lap comes from an old proto-germanic word for a skirt or flap of fabric, which makes sense. Lapping up milk comes from a completely different proto-germanic word for lick. Lapping water comes from the licking sense, but after that it’s a bit harder to pick how you get to the other meanings. Then again a person’s lap has had such a lively life in slang, that it’s easy to imagine those meanings came from something common about laps that we don’t get today.

My favourite slang terms are:

lap-clap for having sex (around 1600)

lap-ful for husband

One meaning of lap I didn’t know until I got curious for this post, was that in the 1300s lap also meant to envelop something. Maybe that’s where the covering and then overlapping idea comes from?

Not everyone gets the bird watching thing. I can accept that, but for me bird watching – and I don’t really call myself a bird watcher – is part of knowing about the world around me. As such, I was happy to go on my mum’s birthday present bird watching day and what a great day we had!

The tour is with a very knowledgeable bird watcher – Paul Hackett – who does this full-time and I gotta say it sounds like a pretty good way to earn a living (other than, maybe, the early starts). Driving people around in the bush and other interesting places showing them all the little feathered things flitting about the branches overhead. Chatting. Having a laugh. Sharing knowledge. Cool!

We went up to the You Yangs which was a treat for me because it’s pink granite country as well as coming across a kangaroo, a wallaby, enormous ants and a very cool moth.

On the ants… I’d love to show you a better picture, but these guys are the kind that start thinking about biting you if you if you stare too long. Having had these up my trouser leg once before, I can tell you I wasn’t about to try for a second photo!

Yep, it’s staring at me – it turned around to stare at me, just so I knew it was watching

Mind you, I wish I’d had a much more powerful lens for this trip. Given what I did have, I’m not unhappy with the percentage of pics that worked.

Long billed correllas

Spot the ‘roo

One You Yangs bird that I cannot find on our eBird Checklist but ain’t that throat a lovely shade of orange?

Spot the moth

From the You Yangs we went to the wetlands that make up the Werribee Water Treatment Plant where we drove in circles around lakes and ponds. There were soooo many birds!

The You Yangs in the distance (from the wetlands)

Whiskered Terns flying

Herron doing tai chi

Some of the birds were very hard to see… which is a shame because up-close they’re very attractive!

Spot the crake (Australian Spotted Crake)

The Water Treatment Plant is a nice place to look at the scenery even if you aren’t bird spotting

Pink “pig face” was flowering everywhere

One more bird pic…

I love spoonbills and black swans!

Possibly the unexpected highlight of the day was a wedge-tailed eagle sitting on the tail of a plane at Avalon Airport!

A big part of going to Scotland was, for me, to see the cairns and standing stones. That there are so many in such a small land area and that they are largely intact is remarkable. Not quite as remarkable as the fact they were built – particularly the standing stones – in the first place. I’m going to revisit the standing stones in this post.

Kilmartin Glen is one of the few neolithic sites I’ve seen where you get a strong sense of a society creating something, because they didn’t just build one or two things here, they built many all in one spot. Whatever it was about landscape or territory that made this the right place to build, this society buried their dead and expressed their beliefs in this one area over a long period.

Nether Largie standing stones

Like a lot of standing stones they are laid out on an axis and are of similar heights.

Nether Largie standing stones

Kilmartin Glen also has two stone circles a few meters apart, in the wonderfully named Temple Wood.

While the Temple Wood is a 19th C addition, the circles have been there – and changed over time – for around 5,000 years

The neolithic landscape on Mainland in the Orkneys gives you a similar sense of interconnected sites, but they are far less dense than Kilmartin Glen. Maybe because they are more spread out, they are also much bigger in scale; the Stones of Stenness are towering wonders and the Ring of Brodgar is on a much grander scale to the stone circles of Temple Wood.

Stones of Stenness – only a few are left of the original 12

Interestingly, both of these sites are also henges – though we only know about the encircling embankment and ditch at Stenness through archeology – putting them on a reasonably small list of such sites within the UK where a stone circle exists within a henge.

Some of the 27 remaining stones in the Ring of Brodgar (there were around 60 originally)

Not as tall as those at Stenness, but the Ring of Brodgar stones are still quite tall!

On Lewis there is also a “ritual landscape” with many standing stones and remains of circles dotted around. The local guide who was showing us around was amusingly dismissive of these small stones (part of a circle) because nothing compares to the scale of the Callanish standing stones.

These just didn’t rate for our guide compared to their nearby friends (sorry about the image quality but we weren’t going close to them)

This gives you a sense of just how many stones make up Callanish I

The Callanish I site is a stone circle with a cross through it, accompanied by stone “alignments” that lead away from the circle. An amazing sight. The time invested in creating all of the circles, stone groups and henges is a bit mind-blowing, but Callanish I is also just lovely in its symmetry.

Even more amazing when the sun is out to throw shadows everywhere

Here you can see the circle pretty well and the chambered tomb that was retrofitted some time after the circle’s original creation

Can I just add that I also liked these standing stones for the actual stone.

Beautiful texture and layers of weathered Lewisian Gneiss

I saw an estimate that, across the UK, only about half the original standing stones remain. Which makes me think that once the entire place was a “ritual landscape”, because you probably couldn’t have walked far without finding a single menhir if not something more substantial!

A bunch of people I know are traveling at the moment and that got me looking back at my Scotland trip. What a trip it was! I got to see so many different things and this was something that stuck with me – boats in a dry-dock in this village by a loch between Oban and Kilmartin.

I particularly like the fact they are up on wouldn’t props, which seems sort of old fashioned, and looks amazing.

As I mentioned a few posts back, I’ve taken a look recently at the oldest of my novels and – probably inevitably – I am still tweaking. Tweaking turns into… well… editing I guess, but in a very small way. And it has been an absolute blast!

I think I’m almost done. But then I probably think it will take longer than I think. *shrug*

I haven’t been writing much lately, or doing many writerly things, but I have been thinking up scenarios for romance novels. Or maybe TV dramas. *shrug*

Where this came from and why I seem to be so entranced by it, is one of those mysteries that may never be solved. Maybe the writing daemon has a crush on someone? Who knows.

The nice thing for my brain has been that none of these ideas are spec-fic. This may in fact be the key to the whole situation, because I think I’m a bit spec-fic’ed out. I’ve worked on nothing by sci-fi for a years now! That’s not exercising all the parts of my imagination, clearly.

Like many writers, I’m “genre agnostic” (isn’t that a deliciously terrible bit of business babble?). I have in “the drawer” a crime novel, a romance novel, a kids novel and… a thriller of sorts. All of these are from the period before I settled into my sci-fi stream. I love SF – it’s not like writing that is a penance – but maybe it’s time to dust off the crime novel?